In the Shadow of the Gods

by Rachel Dunne

  When west ended at the sea Algi named Forsaera—“poison water”—he had turned south, and Algi with him. Sometimes he regretted that he had gone south instead of north, for at length, following the coast, they had come to a desert—the desert, Keiro would learn, the same Eremori that lurked beneath Fiatera. Fratarro, when he had claimed a land of his own and built of it a paradise, had not felt the need to contain his creation to a small piece of the world; and Patharro had not been stingy in his fury, blighting all that Fratarro had built and all the lands it touched. Algi had no name for the desert, and she had terrible nightmares after Keiro told her of Patharro’s destructive hand. When Keiro turned east to follow the edge of the desert, she turned north, to find and rejoin her people. She’d grown into a woman by then, and had kissed Keiro on the mouth before she left. If he’d gone north instead of south at the sea, she might still have been with him.

  With the desert heat distantly shimmering ever at his right, Keiro had found a mighty forest where the air was so thick and damp it beaded on his skin, and long-armed furry creatures with faces that looked almost like his screeched down at him from the heights of the trees. A sleek bear had nearly taken off his leg before Keiro had scrambled up a tree, and then he’d been pelted with nuts and stones by the tree’s residents until the bear had lost interest. An enormous spotted cat had chased him into a pool of water but refused to enter, stalking around the banks, swiping at him and snarling through the longest night he’d ever lived. The only signs he’d seen of humans in the forest had been a few picked-clean bones.

  It had been months since that strange forest, months of rolling hills and plains and forests full of creatures he recognized. He thought of himself when he was a younger man, when he’d thought Fiatera had been such a huge place. He could walk from Raturo to the Northern Wastes in little over a month. It had taken him years to walk to one end of the world, and he intended to walk to the other end of it as well. Fiatera was no more than a drop of ink on the map that rolled through his mind; yet, still, his heart ached for the only true home his wandering feet had ever known. He was still a goodly distance from the southern reaches of Fiatera, but it would be good to again walk the land he had loved, to venture through the dense and sprawling Forest Voro, to gaze upon the sharp peak of Raturo over all . . .

  But no, that was not how things were to be. “Should we see your face again,” Keiro repeated the words that had been said years ago, by the Ventallo who didn’t know him and wrongly hated him for a perceived betrayal, “it shall mean your death.” Fiatera was forbidden to him, the land no longer his to walk.

  No matter. The world was a wide place, and he imagined he would die before he could ever see all of it. That was the way of things. He had found acceptance, in the soft pad of his feet against the earth. He, a man with no home, was made for walking, and walk he would.

  There were, though, some places that could not be walked.

  It had been many years since he had seen the vast river, the river-that-ran-from-the-sun. It lay before him now, so wide he couldn’t see the far bank, flowing steadily south as it fled the sun’s home. The sight of it filled Keiro’s heart with an unexpected fluttering, for it was the first familiar thing he had seen in all his long traveling. The river was wider here, and slower, than to the north, where he had first crossed it, the river having left behind its wild and reckless adolescence, grown into a steady adulthood, but it could only be the same river. He loved it, as much as a man could love a body of water, and he slept that night on the bank of the river-that-ran-from-the-sun with a smile on his face.

  The smile was diminished by the sun’s rising, though. It had taken Keiro months to find a crossing north of the Shrevan hills, and even the point where he had first met the river was far north of where he now stood. There was no knowing what life, if any, lay between his position and that lonely, faraway crossing. His feet itched to walk, but they itched for the far side of the river, for the lands nearer to his forbidden home. He might waste another year trying to find a crossing.

  It was one of the few times in his life that Keiro chose not to walk.

  His father had taught him how to swim, long ago, in rivers and lakes they crossed on their endless walking. Keiro had not swum for a very long time, for the rippling water always seemed to shape itself into staring eyes. He thought he still had the trick of it, though, and it would no doubt be the fastest way to cross the river.

  Of what little he owned, he left most of it where he had slept, a strange collection from a wandering life. A thin grass pallet, so well woven it had lasted him years; his walking stick, less fit for swimming than walking; a lump of stone that threw off rainbows when the light caught it; the hollowed-out horn of some strange beast; a clumsily made journal of parchment and bark and leaves, anything he’d been able to use for writing. He was loath to leave the little carving Algi had made for him, her own face with the smile just right; she’d given it to him the day their paths had gone in different ways, before she’d pressed her mouth to his. He hadn’t had anything to give her.

  He stripped off his robe, ratty and half tatters, but he couldn’t ever bring himself to part with it. He was a preacher still, after all. He knotted it into a crude pack for the few things he was going to keep, his flint, his eyecloth, a bone knife for which he had traded a strange piece of metal that would fly through the air to stick to iron. This he tied across his back, over one shoulder and under one arm, and then he waded into the warm river-that-ran-from-the-sun and began to swim.

  The rivers of Fiatera where he had learned to swim were no match for a river that had spent its whole life racing ahead of the daylight.

  The heat was the worst of it. The hunger he could stand, for he had gone hungry many a time in his wandering. But the heat was almost past the point of bearing, a smothering thickness that tried to crush him against the burning sand.

  He had seen his death, many times, in the long, torturous tumble down the river-that-ran-from-the-sun. So gentle, the river had seemed, from that distant bank. It had proven to be a fierce river no more than a few strokes in, a thing that fought, a thing that did not like to be crossed. It had pulled him under and spat him up more times than he could count, dragged him down its center, where he could see both banks but reach neither, slammed him against rocks and crushed him between their weight and its own force until he thought he would never draw air again. And then he had opened his eye, with sun burning his face and sand burning his back and the river to the west, and he had thought if he could survive the river crossing there was truly nothing that could kill him. He had laughed with joy at life itself, until the laughter turned to sand in his mouth.

  A river, no matter how fierce, was not the worst thing in the world.

  Fire and water, the Parents had used to craft the world, light and life. He had abjured the Parents all his life, and now, wandering deep in the blighted desert, they were taking their revenge, slowly trying to kill him with their favorite weapons. It would not be an easy thing for them, with the river rushing ever at Keiro’s left, but he had been thrown deep into the desert, and the Parents would have their time to try. He didn’t know how long he’d been in the river, how far it had washed him from green lands.

  This land had been Fratarro’s once, empty as it now stood until the god had reached out his hand and named and claimed it for his own, built it into a thing of beauty and serenity. All the tales said it had been a paradise, more wondrous than anything the Parents had ever shaped. Destroyed now, all of it, burned by jealous fire so the very land cracked and crumbled beneath his feet.

  There were echoes, though, echoes of the time before Eremori had been blighted. That, or delusion was settling in, but Keiro saw flickers of something behind his empty eye, something more than the staring babes that usually lurked there. He saw trees once, as grand and proud as the trees in that rainy forest he had passed through, but when he turned his good eye in that direction, there was nothing but sand. He would catch glimpses of en
ormous, black, almost birdlike creatures, hovering far above, but they always dissolved into sunspots. When the sun set and the night-cold bit as hard as the heat, he would hear laughter in the distance, a sound of utter joy, beckoning him away from the river-that-ran-from-the-sun and into the visions that hovered at the edge of his sight. He had been told, in a time long ago, that the blinding ceremony gave preachers a different kind of sight, deeper than what eyes alone were capable of, but if this was even half of that sight, Keiro was glad he hadn’t completed the ritual. The visions alone were bad enough, but the beauty of them was like to break his heart.

  Keiro had walked through many lonely places in his life, walked them all with deep respect and care, and treasured every step. Sometimes, before, he had heard whispers—the voices of those who had walked before him, or the voices of those who watched over the lonely places. Gods, a superstitious man would call them, speaking in the world’s quietest places. Keiro always listened, for a wise man did not ignore a voice offered into silence, and old voices were well worth hearing.

  There was only one voice he would have expected to hear in this loneliest of places, this blighted land that once had been beautiful and full of life and flying with love, this place that had been smote by jealousy, razed by fear. Find me, Fratarro whispered, voice a breath on the dry air.

  “I am trying,” Keiro said aloud through cracked lips, his voice a rasp.

  Find me, and it shimmered through the reflections of the trees that once had been, echoed in the faint cries of the things that were not birds and were no more.

  “See me through this, Fratarro, and I shall,” Keiro promised, head swirling with the heat, eyes fixed on his dark feet so that he would not wander toward the illusions. “I swear I will find you if you let my walking take me out of this place.”

  So fixated was he on his feet and ignoring the distant visions that he almost missed the first bush.

  It was a scrubby, half-dead thing, alive purely out of stubbornness. But it was alive, there in the midst of the endless sand and heat. It was the best thing he had ever seen, in all his long walking. A croak of a laugh burst out of him, and he stumbled toward the bush, falling and scrabbling on sand-burned knees, to cup its scraggly branches with both hands. The bush blurred in front of him, and for a moment he feared it was an illusion, a vision of the former land sent to taunt him. Then he felt the thorns piercing his skin, a sharp sweet pain, and he realized it was only tears blurring his sight.

  There were more bushes over the next hours, singly, as starving as the first, firmly jealous of the ground they had claimed. As he walked on, the sand gave way to a green-tinged land, and the scrub became friendlier, more willing to share space with their neighbors, until Keiro was forced to walk at the very edge of the river to avoid the clustering thorny-brush. The sere grass was sweet against his hardened feet, and though his lips were still cracked from the heat, he found himself whistling softly.

  As the bushes faded to yellow-green grasses, the hard dry earth beginning to roll into hills, a final current of unbearably hot air brushed against Keiro’s face, enough to rob the breath briefly from his lungs, and it carried a whisper: Find me. It was not a plea, not a request. It was a command, as soft yet unyielding as the sand Keiro had left behind.

  It was the only time he looked back at the Eremori Desert. It was distant now, trailing behind the scrub, but he could still see the sands swirling, the air rippling with heat. Keiro’s hands began to shake entirely without his volition.

  Priests of the Parents and preachers of the night alike agreed that Fratarro had broken apart when he fell to the ground, a mighty crashing that rent his limbs from his body with such force that they flew far and wide, landing themselves heavily enough to be buried deeply where they fell. Lost, unfindable, gone as surely as Sororra, wherever she had fallen.

  It would be fitting, Keiro thought, if jealous Patharro had pushed his children from the godworld so that they would land at the heart of Fratarro’s destroyed creation, the land he’d shaped and named Eremori. Fitting, to give Fratarro a grave surrounded by the husks of the mighty creatures he’d created, the winged mravigi, who had fallen burning from the sky at Patharro’s wrath.

  The grass rustled, the river-that-ran-from-the-sun burbled on its way, and birds—real birds—cried out overhead. It was too loud here for any god to speak to one who might be listening. The breath of desert air was gone, but the command remained, hanging heavy in the air. The desert shimmered at him, warning him away like a dog with its hackles raised even as the summons beckoned him back. His death waited there, a slow death, and painful. Keiro knew that as sure as he knew anything in the world. He had felt the brush of death on his back among the sands; it would certainly find him if he dared set foot on the sands again. Perhaps he could find more than death in the desert, find redemption before the heat made his blood boil—but there was no surety to the thought, and his hands still shook as he watched the hot air dance.

  It was the hardest thing he had ever done. Harder than walking away from living twins, harder than the blinding, harder even than watching the drowned babes, their memories still so clear in his mind though it had been years since he had seen a drowning. Every piece of him cried out in protest.

  Keiro turned, putting the deathly heat of the desert once more at his back, and walked deeper into the growing green. He walked with his shoulders hunched, for he would swear he could feel glaring eyes boring into his back as he walked away, shaking.

  CHAPTER 18

  The woman would not stop staring.

  Scal had felt her eyes the moment he had walked into the tavern. Though if he was going to be honest, and he did try to be, he had felt all the eyes on him when he had walked inside. It was nothing he was not used to. There was the difference, though, for all the other eyes had looked away. Some more quickly than others. Some after looks of speculation or hatred or fear. All of it, he was used to. They had all looked away. They always did.

  Except for the one set of eyes that he felt on his back even now as he sat in his quiet corner and cupped his hands around his mug.

  He thought, for a moment, of standing. Turning. Walking to the table where she sat alone. Telling her to stop, or perhaps asking for a reason. He thought these things as he drank the ale that was warm against his tongue, and knew he would never do them.

  A man must know himself above all else, Parro Kerrus had told him. All the paths of all his lives had given Scal more than enough time to know his own heart. He was not a man who would confront a staring woman. He was a man who would sit quietly with hunched shoulders until he finished his drink and could leave this place and her eyes. He knew what kind of a man he was. He was comfortable being such a man.

  He looked up from his mug, and saw that she had moved. For now she sat across from him, her eyes no longer on his back but on his face. He was not an easy man to sneak up on, and it startled him badly. Smiling with one side of her mouth, she mopped up the spilled ale with the flowing sleeve of her yellow cassock. Scal stared with his mouth hanging open.

  He had not spared her more than a glance when he walked into the tavern. One person among a sea of staring faces. He had not seen her. Not truly. Not as he saw her now.

  There had been one caravan, one of the first he had guarded. One of the wagoneers had been a devout man. He had shown Scal his hand, where he had leaned too close to an everflame as the priest added his prayer herbs. “So much prayer,” the wagoneer had joked, “that Patharro blessed me right then.” The skin of his hand had been red and twisted where the fire had touched it.

  The woman’s face was much like the man’s hand had been. Scarred by fire, deeply scarred, from her dark hair to the neckline of the cassock. Her nose was flat, the tip all but gone. One ear, too, was little more than a curl of skin, making her hair fall forward. There was one eye that seemed to have no lid, the same side of her face where the mouth did not move with her smile. Old scars, but scars that would not fade.

  Sca
l realized he was staring and quickly looked down. Her hand, where it rested on the table near his mug, was as badly scarred.

  “Well met.” Her voice was soft. The sound of a lute as a musician ran his fingers over the strings. Scal glanced up, and she was still smiling. As much as she could. He quickly looked back down.

  “Well met, merra,” he returned, though he could not say it with the same enthusiasm as he would usually greet a priestess. It was unworthy of him, he knew, to act so. But knowing did not make the sight of her easier.

  Fingertips touched his cheek, the center of the cross only half hidden by his beard. He flinched away from the touch—more for the act than for the woman, he told himself. He did not know whether or not that was a lie. Her hand dropped back to the table. Glancing up, he saw sadness in her eyes. They were green, the color of sunlight on the leaves of a forest. Still she smiled, though, the half smile.

  “I’ve been looking for you,” she said.

  Scal shifted uncomfortably. Held his mug tighter. Stared at the ale within. “Forgive me, merra,” he said, “but you have the wrong man.”

  “I saw you,” she said, “in the flames. It was a strange vision . . . the first I’ve doubted. A yellow-haired man with the convict’s mark on the wrong cheek. I thought it impossible. I’ve been looking for you for a long time.” She reached out, laid her hand over his around the mug. Her skin was warm, her palm smooth. Untouched, it seemed, by the fire that had scarred her. “Will you tell me your name? Please?”